Diet and nutrition affect health in ways scientific is only beginning to discover.

That is a major message of complementary and alternative medicine and apparently mainstream research is also emphasizing the point:

Saturday, at the American Diabetes Association's annual meeting in Chicago, researchers speculated that our unique population of microbe passengers may determine, in part, our risk for conditions such as diabetes and obesity.

No clinical studies have been launched yet, but altering this bacterial ecosystem could provide novel treatments for these increasingly prevalent conditions.

"We may be able to fix abnormal microbial profiles that were leading to diabetes, obesity and potentially a whole range of other disorders as well," biochemist Jeremy K. Nicholson said.

In mice, scientists found that altering the population of gut bacteria can change eating habits, body fat and insulin resistance.

A human study found that obese and lean people carry different kinds and amounts of bacteria in their digestive systems. Furthermore, diets altered these bacterial populations, suggesting that eating habits could affect the microbial environment.

Last month, the National Institutes of Health announced a funding initiative for a Human Microbiome Project to sequence the DNA of the many bacterial species present in humans....

Scientists hope characterization of these microbes will lead to novel treatments for obesity and diabetes, similar to treatment of peptic ulcers with antibiotics.

Does that mean dietary suppplements promote or inhibit health? The verdict isn't out. The article concludes with this quote: "We've been messing around quite a lot with our microbiome in recent years: going on stupid diets, using and abusing antibiotics, taking stupid dietary supplements when we don't know what they're doing."

An indictment of antibiotics that would likely resonate on the CAM side, and of dietary supplements that would probably resonate on the conventional medicine side.
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